[part of the book Marley & Me, by John Grogan]
"When I arrived at work the next morning, the red message light on my telephone was blinking. I punched in my access code and received a recorded warning I had never heard before. "Your mailbox is full," the voice said. "Please delete all unneeded messages."
I logged on to my computer and opened my e-mail. Same story. The opening screen was filled with new messages, and so was the next screen, and the one after that, and after that, too. The morning e-mail was a ritual for me, a visceral, if inexact, barometer of the impact that day's column had made. Some columns brought as few as five or ten responses, and on hose days I knew I had not connected. Others brought several dozen, a ood day. A few brought even more. But this morning there were hundreds, far more than anything I had received before. The headers at the top of the e-mails said things like "Deepest condolences," "About your loss," or simply "Marley."
Animal lovers are a special breed of human, generous of spirit, full of empathy, perhaps a little prone to entimentality, and with hearts as big as a cloudless sky. Most who wrote and called simply wanted to express their sympathies, to tell me they, too, had been down this road and knew what my family was going through. Others had dogs whose lives
were drawing to their inevitable ends; they dreaded what they knew was coming, just as we had dreaded it, too.
One couple wrote, "We fully understand and we mourn for your loss of Marley, and for our loss of Rusty. They'll always be missed, never truly replaced." A reader named Joyce wrote, "Thanks for reminding us of Duncan, who lies buried in our own backyard." A suburbanite named Debi added: "Our family understands how you feel. This past Labor Day we had to put our golden retriever Chewy to sleep. He was thirteen and had many of the same afflictions you named with your dog. When he couldn't even get up to go outside to relieve himself that last day, we knew we couldn't let him keep suffering. We, too, had a burial in our backyard, under a red maple that will always be his memorial."
An employment recruiter named Monica, owner of Katie the Lab, wrote: "My condolences and tears to you. My girl Katie is only two and I always think, 'Monica, why did you go and let this wonderful creature steal your heart like this?'" From Carmela: "Marley must have been a great dog to have a family that loved him so much. Only dog owners can understand the unconditional love they give and the tremendous heartache when they are gone." From Elaine: "Such short little lives our pets have to spend with us, and they spend most of it waiting for us to come home each day. It is amazing how much love and laughter they bring into our lives and even how much closer we become with each other because of them." From Nancy: "Dogs are one of the wonders of life and add so very much to ours." From MaryPat: "To this day I miss the sound of Max's tags jingling as he padded through the house checking things out; that silence will drive you nuts for a while, especially at night." From Connie: "It's just the most amazing thing to love a dog, isn't it? It makes our relationships with people seem as boring as a bowl of oatmeal."
I logged on to my computer and opened my e-mail. Same story. The opening screen was filled with new messages, and so was the next screen, and the one after that, and after that, too. The morning e-mail was a ritual for me, a visceral, if inexact, barometer of the impact that day's column had made. Some columns brought as few as five or ten responses, and on hose days I knew I had not connected. Others brought several dozen, a ood day. A few brought even more. But this morning there were hundreds, far more than anything I had received before. The headers at the top of the e-mails said things like "Deepest condolences," "About your loss," or simply "Marley."
Animal lovers are a special breed of human, generous of spirit, full of empathy, perhaps a little prone to entimentality, and with hearts as big as a cloudless sky. Most who wrote and called simply wanted to express their sympathies, to tell me they, too, had been down this road and knew what my family was going through. Others had dogs whose lives
were drawing to their inevitable ends; they dreaded what they knew was coming, just as we had dreaded it, too.
One couple wrote, "We fully understand and we mourn for your loss of Marley, and for our loss of Rusty. They'll always be missed, never truly replaced." A reader named Joyce wrote, "Thanks for reminding us of Duncan, who lies buried in our own backyard." A suburbanite named Debi added: "Our family understands how you feel. This past Labor Day we had to put our golden retriever Chewy to sleep. He was thirteen and had many of the same afflictions you named with your dog. When he couldn't even get up to go outside to relieve himself that last day, we knew we couldn't let him keep suffering. We, too, had a burial in our backyard, under a red maple that will always be his memorial."
An employment recruiter named Monica, owner of Katie the Lab, wrote: "My condolences and tears to you. My girl Katie is only two and I always think, 'Monica, why did you go and let this wonderful creature steal your heart like this?'" From Carmela: "Marley must have been a great dog to have a family that loved him so much. Only dog owners can understand the unconditional love they give and the tremendous heartache when they are gone." From Elaine: "Such short little lives our pets have to spend with us, and they spend most of it waiting for us to come home each day. It is amazing how much love and laughter they bring into our lives and even how much closer we become with each other because of them." From Nancy: "Dogs are one of the wonders of life and add so very much to ours." From MaryPat: "To this day I miss the sound of Max's tags jingling as he padded through the house checking things out; that silence will drive you nuts for a while, especially at night." From Connie: "It's just the most amazing thing to love a dog, isn't it? It makes our relationships with people seem as boring as a bowl of oatmeal."
When the messages finally stopped coming several days later, I counted them up. Nearly eight hundred people, animal lovers all, had been moved to contact me. It was an incredible outpouring, and what a catharsis it was for me. By the time I had plowed through them all-and answered as many as I could-I felt better, as though I was part of a giant cyber-support group. My private mourning had become a public therapy session, and in this crowd there was no shame in admitting a real, piercing grief for something as seemingly inconsequential as an old, smelly dog.
My correspondents wrote and called for another reason, too. They wanted to dispute the central premise of my report, the part in which I insisted Marley was the world's worst-behaved animal. "Excuse me," the typical response went, "but yours couldn't have been the world's worst dog-because mine was." To make their case, they regaled me with detailed accounts of their pets' woeful behavior. I heard about shredded curtains, stolen lingerie, devoured birthday cakes, trashed auto interiors, great escapes, even a swallowed diamond engagement ring, which made Marley's taste for gold chains seem positively lowbrow by comparison. My in-box resembled a television talk show, Bad Dogs and the People Who Love Them, with the willing victims lining up to proudly brag, not about how wonderful their dogs were but about just how awful. Oddly enough, most of the horror stories involved large loopy retrievers just like mine. We weren't alone after all.
A woman named Elyssa described how her Lab Mo always broke out of the house when left alone, usually by crashing through window screens. Elyssa and her husband thought they had foiled Mo's wandering ways by closing and locking all the ground-floor windows. It hadn't occurred to them to close the upstairs windows, as well. "One day my husband came home and saw the second-floor screen hanging loose. He was scared to death to look for him," she wrote. Just as her husband began to fear the worst, "Mo all of a sudden came around the corner of the house with his head down. He knew he was in trouble, but we were amazed he was not hurt. He had flown through the window and landed on a sturdy bush that broke his fall."
Larry the Lab swallowed his mistress's bra and then burped it up in one piece ten days later. Gypsy, another Lab with adventurous tastes, devoured a jalousie window. Jason, a retriever–Irish setter mix, downed a five-foot vacuum cleaner hose, "interior reinforcing wire and all," his owner, Mike, reported. "Jason also ate a two-by-three-foot hole in a plaster wall and backhoed a three-foot-long trench in the carpet, stretching back from his favorite spot by the window," Mike wrote, adding, "but I loved that beast."
Phoebe, a Lab mix, was kicked out of two different boarding kennels and told never to return, owner Aimee wrote. "It seems she was the gang leader in breaking out of not only her cage but doing the favor for two other dogs, too. They then helped themselves to all kinds of snacks during the overnight hours." Hayden, a hundred-pound Lab, ate just about anything he could get his jaws around, owner Carolyn reported, including a whole box of fish food, a pair of suede loafers, and a tube of superglue, "not in the same sitting." She added: "His finest hour, though, was when he tore the garage-door frame out of the wall because I had foolishly attached his leash to it so he could lie in the sunshine."
Tim reported his yellow Lab Ralph was every bit as much a food thief as Marley, only smarter. One day before going out, Tim placed a large chocolate centerpiece on top of the refrigerator where it would be safely out of Ralph's reach. The dog, his owner reported, pawed open the cupboard drawers, then used them as stairs to climb onto the counter, where he could balance on his hind legs and reach the chocolate, which was gone without a trace when his master returned home. Despite the chocolate overdose, Ralph showed no ill effects. "Another time," Tim wrote, "Ralph opened the refrigerator and emptied its contents, including things in jars."
Nancy clipped my column to save because Marley reminded her so much of her retriever Gracie. "I left the article on the kitchen table and turned to put away the scissors," Nancy wrote. "When I turned back, sure enough, Gracie had eaten the column."
Wow, I was feeling better by the minute. Marley no longer sounded all that terrible. If nothing else, he certainly had plenty of company in the Bad Dog Club. I brought several of the messages home to share with Jenny, who laughed for the first time since Marley's death. My new friends in the Secret Brotherhood of Dysfunctional Dog Owners had helped us more than they ever would know."
My correspondents wrote and called for another reason, too. They wanted to dispute the central premise of my report, the part in which I insisted Marley was the world's worst-behaved animal. "Excuse me," the typical response went, "but yours couldn't have been the world's worst dog-because mine was." To make their case, they regaled me with detailed accounts of their pets' woeful behavior. I heard about shredded curtains, stolen lingerie, devoured birthday cakes, trashed auto interiors, great escapes, even a swallowed diamond engagement ring, which made Marley's taste for gold chains seem positively lowbrow by comparison. My in-box resembled a television talk show, Bad Dogs and the People Who Love Them, with the willing victims lining up to proudly brag, not about how wonderful their dogs were but about just how awful. Oddly enough, most of the horror stories involved large loopy retrievers just like mine. We weren't alone after all.
A woman named Elyssa described how her Lab Mo always broke out of the house when left alone, usually by crashing through window screens. Elyssa and her husband thought they had foiled Mo's wandering ways by closing and locking all the ground-floor windows. It hadn't occurred to them to close the upstairs windows, as well. "One day my husband came home and saw the second-floor screen hanging loose. He was scared to death to look for him," she wrote. Just as her husband began to fear the worst, "Mo all of a sudden came around the corner of the house with his head down. He knew he was in trouble, but we were amazed he was not hurt. He had flown through the window and landed on a sturdy bush that broke his fall."
Larry the Lab swallowed his mistress's bra and then burped it up in one piece ten days later. Gypsy, another Lab with adventurous tastes, devoured a jalousie window. Jason, a retriever–Irish setter mix, downed a five-foot vacuum cleaner hose, "interior reinforcing wire and all," his owner, Mike, reported. "Jason also ate a two-by-three-foot hole in a plaster wall and backhoed a three-foot-long trench in the carpet, stretching back from his favorite spot by the window," Mike wrote, adding, "but I loved that beast."
Phoebe, a Lab mix, was kicked out of two different boarding kennels and told never to return, owner Aimee wrote. "It seems she was the gang leader in breaking out of not only her cage but doing the favor for two other dogs, too. They then helped themselves to all kinds of snacks during the overnight hours." Hayden, a hundred-pound Lab, ate just about anything he could get his jaws around, owner Carolyn reported, including a whole box of fish food, a pair of suede loafers, and a tube of superglue, "not in the same sitting." She added: "His finest hour, though, was when he tore the garage-door frame out of the wall because I had foolishly attached his leash to it so he could lie in the sunshine."
Tim reported his yellow Lab Ralph was every bit as much a food thief as Marley, only smarter. One day before going out, Tim placed a large chocolate centerpiece on top of the refrigerator where it would be safely out of Ralph's reach. The dog, his owner reported, pawed open the cupboard drawers, then used them as stairs to climb onto the counter, where he could balance on his hind legs and reach the chocolate, which was gone without a trace when his master returned home. Despite the chocolate overdose, Ralph showed no ill effects. "Another time," Tim wrote, "Ralph opened the refrigerator and emptied its contents, including things in jars."
Nancy clipped my column to save because Marley reminded her so much of her retriever Gracie. "I left the article on the kitchen table and turned to put away the scissors," Nancy wrote. "When I turned back, sure enough, Gracie had eaten the column."
Wow, I was feeling better by the minute. Marley no longer sounded all that terrible. If nothing else, he certainly had plenty of company in the Bad Dog Club. I brought several of the messages home to share with Jenny, who laughed for the first time since Marley's death. My new friends in the Secret Brotherhood of Dysfunctional Dog Owners had helped us more than they ever would know."
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